|
Irwin August 1997
|
Irwin Courterly August 1997
California is known for its terrific weather. People flock to the Bay Area in particular, following the promise of fine days all year round. I came for other reasons, but I certainly wasn’t too surprised when day after day the sun shone brightly and the temperature reached a comfortable "warm"--the kind of weather that allows you to do whatever you choose. It doesn’t get in your way. In fact, it isn’t a true presence at all. It is just this absence of weather that is so peculiar. One doesn’t have to suspend plan-making to wait and see how the weather will be. One doesn’t have to adjust plans according to the weather. It is easy to ignore the weather entirely. After more than a month of living under California skies I became aware of a subtle void in my daily encounters. Something seemed to be out of place. Someone was missing. I realized I had gone weeks without having any interaction with the weather. I counted on a certain performance, received it without variation, and so ceased my conversations with the forces that might elsewhere draw clouds, wind, or even rain. I left the weather alone, and it in turn paid me no attention. We grew more and more distant until at last I had a sense I was being neglected The weather started to enter my conversations again, especially when old and new acquaintances asked why I would prefer to live on the East Coast. The seasons, the snow...these are all common answers. I said I missed the rain. What I couldn’t articulate was that I missed the weather itself. Shortly after these conversations began there were late morning dark skies and talk of a tropical storm. My hopes soared. The rain did come down, and I heard rumors of thunder (and nothing more of it). I’m sure people’s plans had to be changed. The juice bar customers were elsewhere, and I left work early. I walked home under a gentle rainfall and tried to reestablish my rapport with the weather. We murmured awkward phrases to one another, like acquaintances who’ve been out of touch for too long. The rain continued all evening and into the night with admirable determination. The view from the apartment window looked odd under its wet covering. Windshield wipers strained at the unfamiliar activity, and umbrellas seemed rusty at opening. It was easy enough to ignore the rain, being indoors, and it only arriving once the day was practically over. Some part of me was still hoping for a more dramatic return: a violent storm with blinding lightning and deafening thunder. Levels of passion are rarely satisfying, even after a long absence. The next day nearly all the traces had dried up and the interruption went unnoticed, for the most part. The sky returned to its remarkable clear blueness, so rarely remarked upon. It’s hard to say how many of us had turned our faces toward the water. It’s hard to say how many had seized the opportunity to escape from the world behind a protective layer of clouds. Weather, in my memory, sparkles like diamonds. When the rain falls, it’s hard to say if its drops or the people’s tears have washed their faces clean. Keep love in the present, and leave the rest to Mother Nature. Robin Reportby the prodigal Xip The IC was finally able to track down Robin Brooks this week, after several phone calls to her residence which were not returned. Robin claims to have been unable to use the phone because she suddenly became completely deaf in her left ear, and for some reason she has never been able to talk on the telephone using her right ear. While this reporter is skeptical that such a story could possibly be true, there is no logical reason for Robin to lie about her telephone habits. As for the deafness excuse, the IC was able to obtain Robin’s confidential medical records, and learned that during the week of September 1-8 she visited the University Health Service three times, and the Summit Hospital ear, nose, and throat clinic twice. During this time she also bought over $100 worth of prescription medication, all of which was at least tangentially related to ears. Upon thorough questioning, Robin offered the following advice about aural health: "Do not use earplugs for prolonged periods, and if you get water in your ear, please have it professionally removed within 24 hours. Your earliest convenience is not early enough. You must remove it immediately." Robin continued that an ear irrigation is a unique and fun diversion which seems like a miracle cure, but that anyone who has had foreign water in her ears for more than a week should be sure to follow the procedure with conscientious use of antibiotic ear drops even if infection has not set in yet. As our readers may guess, Robin had more to reveal in our interview with her than merely her wisdom about ears. She also gave a complete report on her trip to Bulgaria and the progress of her dissertation. Robin noted that the most important thing that she learned on her trip was that many of her assumptions about ethnic politics in Bulgaria were wrong. She hopes that she has a better picture of reality now, and plans to update her prospectus to reflect the new information that she has gained. She is particularly thankful to Margarita Asenova, Jordan Danchev, and the foundation Journalists for Tolerance for setting up her interviews, critiquing her project, and showing her a very good time in Plovdiv and Kardzhali for 2 weeks. In addition to the many interviews that Robin conducted in Bulgaria, she learned quite a bit from lectures by Zhoro Nikolov and Lyuben Botusharov at the IREX seminar. Zhoro shared his knowledge of Bulgarian history and the Bulgarian party system, as well as helping Robin locate the statistical data that will be crucial to her analysis of Pomak (ethnically Slavic, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims) ethnic self-identification. Lyuben also provided Robin with some empirical information about Bulgarian folk culture, but his more important contribution to Robin’s project was his formal model of the sabor at Gela. After the 2-day bagpipe festival in question, Lyuben formulated a theory about authenticity and tradition that Robin is certain can be used to help understand ethnic behavior, as well. Although students of the humanities tend to feel woosley when confronted with this type of activity, Robin has developed a new passion for formal modeling. Indeed, this semester she is taking a course in modeling and game theory. Robin’s semester seems to be fine so far. The post-communism exam (8 hours, written) will be administered on October 10, and the comparative politics exam is on October 18, so Robin should certainly get to work studying hard if she expects to pass these important tests. In order to allow her to do so, this reporter did not heckle her for too long with this interview, and consequently, this is all the information we have at this time. Tune in next month for a more detailed account of ethnic politics in Bulgaria. Early Entrepreneursby Robert Hawkins Greetings from Back East where, up and down the cost, we're having a typical Eastern summer: hazy, hot and humid. When the temperature and humidity hover around 90 and an ice cold beverage really hits the spot; it's easy to imagine how those post-colonial Yankee merchants could make a very respectable living exporting ice to the tropics. That's right, at the height of the New England ice trade, in the mid 1800's, Yankee seamen were moving a hundred forty to a hundred fifty thousand tons of ice per year to tropical ports of call in the Caribbean, India, China, The Philippines, and Australia. It all began around 1800 when two brothers named Tudor, from a well-considered Boston shipping family, decided to try something new. Americans were already known around the world for their relatively small, but sleek and fast, ships that sailed with unusually young and well-adjusted crews *. Their cargoes, however, were almost always of foreign origin. A typical voyage might take sugar from the West Indies to the Baltic States, where it could be sold and the proceeds used to buy iron, hemp, and canvas which were in high demand in the Far East. In India the Baltic cargo would be exchanged for cotton, which went on to China, where it was exchanged for tea, silk and chinaware, which brought a high return back in Boston when the ship finally returned home. Each exchange of cargo brought in a profit for the ship owner, and for the captain and crew who were allowed to trade small cargoes of their own in each port. The Tudor brother's thought it would be nice to start the voyage with a product native to their region. Their product of choice was an inexpensive natural resource, more than abundant and easily harvested in its winter season. The problem was how to transport it to perpetually hot points of high demand without losing most or all of it along the way. Just after the turn of the century, they outfitted a ship for a feasibility voyage, and landed enough unmelted ice in Martinique to make the business case. Having proved the point, one brother lost interest in the enterprise. However, Frederic Tudor stayed with it, and by 1812 was shipping ice regularly to Havana and New Orleans. As the ice trade grew, Tudor worked on ways to improve storage and drainage on ships making long voyages in the Torrid Zone. A mechanically minded associate of his named Wyeth developed machinery to move the ice quickly and efficiently from its inland source to the ships waiting in the harbor. In 1833 they amazed the competition by landing a profitable cargo of New England's winter pond crop in India. But, although the ice trade was based in large part on Yankee business acumen and seamanship, the enabling storage technology was not original with the Yankees. It was borrowed from the Shakers. The Shakers, best known today for their severe design style and offbeat religious views, were prolific agricultural technologists. From their original community north of Albany, NY, they moved into New England and the Ohio Basin, spreading innovations in building, tools, and organization that were unparalleled in a rural America not known for its agricultural efficiency. The flat headed broom that we use today, far more efficient than it's cylindrical predecessor, was a Shaker invention, as were the split wooden clothespin and the one-horse farm wagon. The Shakers also developed widely adopted versions of the screw propeller, the turbine waterwheel, the hand-powered washing machine, and the threshing machine. They were the first to sell garden seeds in small, labeled paper packages, and, being an honest folk, they invented a machine that filled the packets accurately. The Shakers also built amazingly efficient icehouses using heavy timbered double walls with sawdust between, triple roofs similarly insulated, and stone floors covered with straw and sawdust. It was the Shaker icehouse design, when applied to sailing ships, that made it possible to transport a load of ice halfway around the world to the warmest of tropical ports and make a profit selling it. The Shakers may have built excellent icehouses simply because they felt, "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right." Their record of other achievements would lend credence to that view. Or it may have had more to do with their fondness for good food and lots of it. Ascetic to a fault in most aspects, they went to the opposite extreme when it came to eating. A typical Shaker breakfast included oatmeal, stewed fruit, hash, eggs, coffee, pie and doughnuts. They were known for delectable pies, delicious gravies, and elegant breads. The Shakers' gastronomic leanings surely contributed to a responsible attitude toward the application of cold to comestibles, and the need to maintain a reliable supply of ice nearby. It has been suggested that the Shakers' appreciation of ice lead them to develop that most barbaric of beverages (at least to the British), iced tea. And who knows? Documentation is sketchy, but they may also be responsible for another great American tradition, the midnight raid on the icebox for a tasty nocturnal snack. The debate comes down to an issue of money. Money can buy, protect from, and take care of the public. It can make the public private, maintain the privacy of those with money, and receive special treatment such as capital gains tax cuts, nicer prison cells and corporate welfare. The remaining public are welfare recipients (a "public burden"), social service organizationss struggling to meet an increasing need for counseling, rehabilitation, housing, job training and child care. Capitalism struggles with the public/private debate because money can buy both.
Movie Review: Contacting Godby Speer Itchual The skeptical scientist in me wonders about the existence of God, but spiritually and emotionally I can imagine some kind of "greater power" and an appreciation for the universe out of anyone’s control and larger than we can comprehend. But regardless of having proof of any Being, we cannot live without a certain level of faith, and faith in ourselves extends beyond ourselves. We may find, by a simple twist of fate, that we indeed believe. Jodie Foster, starring as Elly in the new movie Contact, played a scientist reaching out into space to find other intelligent life, struggling with earthly challenges such as lack of funding and lack of faith that her dreams might actually be groundbreaking scientific discovery. Elly thought that most of the world (95%) who believed in God created God to keep them company, to watch out for them; that they created God and not that God created them. She was firmly convinced of her own objectiveness through science, through facts, but faced with no evidence to show for her experiences with the depths or distance of the universe those who heard her story thought she was having delusions or telling lies. The mirror turned, and she had to see herself as she had viewed religious people, and to question faith. She was alone in her experience, and could only hope that others could also enjoy what she had seen and felt. When we have no proof of an experience so profound, so beautiful that we cannot describe it we can only rely on faith that others will believe our experience was "real" and not a delusion. The only way to avoid the loneliness of a vast universe is to be together, and to believe in each other. Elly will never believe in the God she thinks others worship, but she now has her own concept of something expansive which both humbles us and gives us hope. Science is its own religion. God Part II
One of the many odd, yet seemingly permanent fixtures on the UC Berkeley campus is the "Karl Marx’s ties with Satan" man. Last week, he was handing out a new pamphlet in addition to his usual Marx flier. The new publication is called "The Atheist Test," and contains the following proof that God exists: The banana -- the athiest's nightmare.
We at the Irwin Courterly are not certain whether we are convinced by the banana evidence, but we do wonder whether Michael Swaine might have played some role in the perforation of the banana’s non-slip, biodegradable "wrapper." Odds, Ends and Other Tidbits
|